(Picture with permission from Belfast Live)
In a remarkable article buried on page 6 of The Irish Times of Friday 16 September, Simon Carswell recalls an overnight visit by Prince Charles in 1995 to a fishing lodge in Mayo, in the West of Ireland. The location may have been chosen because of its proximity to the area known by Lord Mountbatten prior to his assassination by the IRA in 1979; it was a private visit to paint and to fish, added to Prince Charles’ first official visit – and indeed the first by a senior royal to Ireland since 1911 – to meet President Mary Robinson and Taoiseach John Bruton, and to celebrate his mother’s birthday at the British Embassy.
This was the royal family dipping its toes into Irish waters before the completion of the peace process, a trip deemed a great success, in which he “visibly touched the hearts of everyone he met and spoke to” and “created an opportunity for the Taoiseach [John Bruton] to move the peace process forward.” A planned trip the following year, however, was cancelled due to security concerns. Since then, according to the BBC, Prince Charles and Camilla made six trips to the Republic of Ireland, and The Prince of Wales made 40 trips to Northern Ireland, nineteen of them with Camilla. One of them was to our local village, Churchhill, to see Glenveagh Castle and the Glebe Gallery. This was the home of the late Derek Hill, who was a painting companion of the Prince's. So his affection for Ireland is well-established – though he may never now have the chance to visit all 32 counties, reportedly an ambition of his.
Millions of words have already been published during the first week of the new King’s reign about his priorities and passions, but little has been said about his love of Ireland and his commitment to supporting the peace process. In King Charles: The Monarch and the Man, an ITV documentary, Jonathan Dimbleby drew a portrait of a man committed to “spiritual harmony” between humanity and the environment, between world religions. That passion for reconciliation and harmony has also been applied to the peace process in Northern Ireland. (Perhaps we also saw it in the efforts to reach out to Harry and Meghan last week by himself and Prince William.) Much has also been said about how, now he is King, the nature of his interventions will need to change. But it is hard to believe that he will lose the concern he (and his late mother) demonstrated so powerfully for the cause of peace in Northern Ireland, or that he will fail to warn political leaders in private at least if that peace is at all threatened.
Meanwhile, I believe the article I wrote for Northern Slant in 2018, “Prince Charles: The End of Art is Peace” bears republishing:
“Reaching out is an imperative of leadership”, Prince Charles said during his speech in Cork City Hall towards the end of last week’s Royal Visit to “Ireland, North and South”, which he and the Duchess of Cornwall had “come to love” and had visited four times in as many years. He was reflecting on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s poem “The Handshake”, from which he quoted:
“Because it is tough.
Because it is meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory, the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading.”
Prince Charles’s visit was bookended with handshakes with former IRA prisoners. He had begun his visit to Northern Ireland two days earlier by shaking the hands of North Belfast Sinn Féin MLAs Gerry Kelly and Carál Ní Chulaín during a visit to Carlisle Memorial Methodist Church. The venue was carefully chosen: the partially restored church, to become the home of the Ulster Orchestra, sits on an interface – Protestants are said to walk one side of the road, and Catholics on the other – and marks the gateway to the Crumlin Road. It is fast becoming a symbol of Belfast’s regeneration – with Crumlin Road Gaol now one of Belfast’s top visitor attractions, the crumbling Courthouse to become a hotel, and the Carnegie Oldpark Library also due to be restored. Peacewalls are being removed at the top of Crumlin Road, and there are thriving, new community facilities at the Houben Centre and Girdwood Hub.
The Prince ended his Irish visit in Kerry by shaking the hand of Sinn Féin TD and former IRA prisoner Martin Ferris. In between, he met privately with DUP leader Arlene Foster, visited victims of the 1998 Omagh bomb and then, in Cork, met Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and Northern SF leader Michelle O’Neill – among many less political engagements.
Every moment of this visit was cleverly and precisely orchestrated. The royals have learned, including from bitter experience, that every non-verbal gesture is counted. When they do speak it is usually brief and every word is equally carefully chosen.
This week’s events and symbolic gestures did not, of course, come out of the blue. Martin Ferris said after Prince Charles’s visit to Kerry: “From a national perspective it’s another step on the peace and reconciliation journey that both Prince Charles and the British Government and the British royal family are involved with along with Republicans on this island.” The handshake to which Ó Tuama’s poem refers took place between the Queen and Martin McGuiness in June 2012. That followed what Tánaiste Simon Coveney TD described last week as the “watershed moment” of the Queen’s visit to Ireland in 2011 when she visited the Garden of Remembrance. Almost as significant was Prince Charles’s own meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in May 2015 when he went to Mullaghmore to remember the assassination of his uncle Lord Mountbatten by the IRA.
In September 2015, I wrote in The Tablet of the link between the evolution of the response of Sinn Féin to the royal family and the “Uncomfortable Conversations” spearheaded by SF chairperson Declan Kearney. That initiative also included a book with contributions from various church and political leaders, both sides of the divide, and a series of private conversations amongst unionists and nationalists. At the book’s launch at the Mansion House in Dublin in September 2015, the British Ambassador to Ireland, Dominick Chilcott, said that there would be more efforts by the British royal family and the wider British establishment to secure the peace process.
That article, written before the Brexit referendum, the collapse of Stormont, the death of Martin McGuinness, and the Tory-DUP pact, reads as if from another galaxy. The context for the conversations and indeed the gestures of the royal family has changed utterly. Brexit negotiations have challenged the relationship between the British and Irish Prime Ministers and governments; the DUP/Tory pact has compromised, at least in the public view, the British government’s contribution to the ongoing peace process – for example, regarding the release of funding for unresolved legacy cases and the possibility of prosecutions of former British soldiers. The Stormont Assembly has been in limbo for well over a year.
My understanding of loyalism is that it is nothing if not loyal to the royal family, and therefore the unionist community cannot but take notice of Prince Charles’s example, which must in turn be interpreted as a challenge to them. Britain and Ireland are, he said in Cork “not just neighbours, but old friends who, tragically, have travelled a troubled road, along which many wrongs have been done”.
This is why, he said, “I have felt it of such importance that we should keep coming to Ireland – to demonstrate, in whatever small way we can, just how vital and valuable the ties between our countries are to us all. On each visit we have met so many unforgettable people who are doing such noteworthy things to strengthen that relationship, in almost every imaginable sphere. I therefore have nothing but the greatest confidence that the friendship, collaboration and mutual understanding that Ireland and the United Kingdom have enjoyed over recent years will endure, as we work together to find solutions to shared challenges and as our relationship evolves in the months and years ahead.”
Having quoted John O Donohue, rather enigmatically – “the celtic understanding… had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral. The circle never reduces the mystery to a single direction or preference” – and Ó Tuama, Prince Charles ended his Cork speech with Seamus Heaney and his poem “The Harvest Bow”:
“’The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device…’
He went on: “The harvest is, of course, the work of many hands, the result of much preparation, and of long labour. So as we play our own part in the work before us, let us always remember that, as Heaney said, “The end of art is peace.”